PRESENTATION Doubting Jesus: A Doubter’s Guide to Ancient, Non-Christian Sources By Mikel Del Rosario In this video, Mikel Del Rosario shares ancient, non-Christian sources which help build a historical case for the existence of Jesus. “Doubting Jesus: A Doubter’s Guide to Ancient, Non-Christian Sources” was delivered live at Still Water Community Church in Rowlett, TX. …

Ladies, I’m sorry if you don’t want to admit what the bible clearly says about things like racism, slavery, genocide, misogyny, honor killings, human sacrifice, etc. but your denial doesn’t change what it says. I don’t need an education in how to read it correctly, you need a morality lesson in intellectual honesty. Your dogmatic beliefs have blinded you to an honest reading of the texts. And there you go again Susan, attacking my character and saying that I never was a Christian. I guess you’re able to judge the heart. Maybe you are god Susan. You are an arrogant, self righteous woman.

I used to think that Christians had two brains—one was lost and the other was out looking for it. For me, the "faith" of Christianity was an arbitrary decision to dogmatically believe in something despite all the evidence to the contrary. I thought faith was blind. So, when a group of Christians challenged me to investigate the evidence for Christianity intellectually, I thought it was a joke. I accepted their challenge, fully intending to destroy Christianity and rub it in their faces.

As we continue our introduction of fundamental apologetics concepts, we move onto the second of the “Big Three” apologetics arguments: the teleological argument. The teleological argument, like the cosmological argument, is a logical defense of God predicated upon the observable universe. In other words, it is a way to prove God’s existence by looking at things in the physical universe.

For though we live in the world, we do not wage war as the world does. The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.

As a young father myself, I wanted to understand what caused the young men and women in our community to become gang members in the first place. It certainly didn’t seem to have anything to do with their race, culture or economic status, given the fact that they didn’t share any of these attributes.

This book had great potential, when he actually gets into the apologetic part of the book it's great material.there are principles in this book, that if studied and applied would definitely help equip one to defend their faith. I especially like the portion of this book that harmonize the gospels and feel that any Christian can benefit from that study, Pearson does a great job reconciling so called contradictions in the new testament. The only negatives is this book is slow getting started, and very much overillistrates, a lot more apologetic material could have been implemented in this book if not for the many illustrations.

Some time ago I wrote a post called “ Why I Trust the Bible .” In that article, I gave five reasons why I personally believe the Bible to be trustworthy. There are, of course, many more reasons than that to believe the Bible is true, so I thought it would be a good idea to share five more reasons why we can trust the Bible. We have confidence in the Bible as God’s true and trusted speech to us because:

What is the effectiveness of apologetics ? The Holy Scriptures tell us that God has revealed himself to mankind but that humanity as a whole does not want God (Romans 1:18-20). This leads people to create crafty ways in which to avoid God. Jesus also revealed the inner depths of the human psyche in this exchange of God’s wooing and the human response to that truth in the Parable of the Sower (Matthew 13:3-23, Mark 4:2-20, Luke 8:4-18). In this parable, the sower (one who relays God’s truth) scatters seeds (the truth of God) and the seeds fall on four different kinds of ground (types of human dispositions).

“Our underlying goal for the staff and members at CrossFit Infiltrate…is total health and well-being for the individual and the community,” wrote the management in a group email. “We believe that true health forever can only be found within humility, not pride…As a business we will choose to deploy our resources towards those efforts and causes that line up with our own values and beliefs.”

Christianity is distinct in the nature of its claims and the value it places on reason, intelligence, and evidence. Some religious systems are based purely on the doctrinal, proverbial statements of their founders. The wisdom statements of Buddha, for example, lay the foundation for Buddhism. Hinduism is based on the revelations of the ancient sages as revealed in the Vedas and the Upanishads . Confucianism is established from the wisdom statements of Confucius. In all these examples, the statements of these religious leaders exist independently of any event in history. In other words, these systems rise or fall on the basis of ideas and concepts rather than on claims about a particular historical event .

Josh’s second question is “Where do you see his works most clearly?” My answer is that wherever saving truth is hated and resisted and distorted and muted, Satan is at work so that people are kept from being saved by the truth of the gospel. That’s where I see his works most clearly.

There is no question that there are flood stories across many times and cultures. Indeed, some young earth creationists cite this as the single best evidence for a global flood. What is most interesting, however, is the total similarity between some earlier flood stories from the same Ancient Near Eastern time and place as what the Noahic deluge story would later originate. Montgomery surveys this early history, noting the amazing discovery of more ancient flood myths in Sumerian writings. At least 3 different flood stories were discovered in these ancient fragments, and they yielded many similarities with the biblical flood account (153ff). Alongside discoveries like this, the rise of deism threatened Christianity and led to some reactionary responses to both the discoveries and the age. On the other hand, many Christian theologians moved to see Genesis as “a synopsized or allegrical explanation of how the world came to be rather than a comprehensive history of everything that ever existed” (167).

Notice how atheists who believe in real right and wrong make a massive intellectual leap of faith. They believe that somehow moral facts were eternally part of the “furniture” of reality but that from impersonal and valueless slime, human persons possessing rights, dignity, worth, and duties were eventually produced.

Here’s how to get started again: Humble yourselves and admit your failure. Confess to your wife your sin. Go apart with God and plan a week of devotions with her and the family. Announce to them that a new day is dawning on the home front. Then lead them to God. This is so threatening to some of you it makes you tense to think of it. You will have to swallow so much pride. But be courageous. Fear is a scrawny enemy. Do not let him conquer you. I promise you that once you have gotten over the first hill, a new world will open before you. The ugly guilt will be gone. The sense of failure will be gone. The uncertainty of your love for God and the family will be gone. And a dozen areas of tension in your marriage will be healed which you did not know had anything to do with family devotions.

The Christian explanation (although it is a miraculous, supernatural explanation) suffers from the least number of liabilities and deficiencies. If we simply enter into the investigation without a preexisting bias against anything supernatural, the Christian explanation accounts for all of the evidence without any difficulty. The conclusion that Jesus was resurrected (as reported in the Gospels) can be sensibly inferred from the available evidence. The resurrection is reasonable. This brief review of the issues related to the resurrection is excerpted from Cold-Case Christianity: A Homicide Detective Investigates the Claims of the Gospels . For more information, please refer to Chapter Two – Learn How to Infer . A complete assessment of the evidence for the Resurrection can also be obtained as an accessible Easter “tract” called ALIVE.

If people don’t educate themselves on the subject and use multiple sources of information, they won’t know that refugees go through a vetting process before moving to a shelter country. The lack of knowledge and understanding is a huge issue today 😔

Blackmore’s ‘absolutist’ views are mostly, to do with her lack of knowledge rather than her knowledge of that which she is merely ignorant of. Peterson just prefers to call himself a ‘theist’ without defining exactly what god it is he believes in.🤔

The human brain consists of approximately 12 billion cells, forming 120 trillion interconnections. The light sensitive retina of the eye (which is really part of the brain) contains over 10 million photoreceptor cells. These cells capture the light pattern formed by the lens and convert it into complex electrical signals, which are then sent to a special area of the brain where they are transformed into the sensation we call vision.

People we meet and audiences we address frequently ask us for brief descriptions of the best scientific evidences for God. Depending on individual backgrounds, what is best for one person will be different for someone else. However, in the more than 30-year history of Reasons to Believe, one or more of the following five have proven most effective in persuading modern-day non-theists that the God of the Bible really does exist:

More and more young people are leaving the church. Statistics show that once your children leave for college, they’re probably going to abandon their faith. Men, what are you going to do about that? Are you going to sit back and watch that happen, or are you going to fight for your children’s faith? Studying apologetics will give you the tools to inoculate your children against the false worldviews and beliefs they will certainly encounter in school and on social media.

Ever since I’ve heard about Jesus mythycists, the question I’ve always wanted to ask them is: “What are you smoking?!” Furthermore, I frankly wonder why anyone takes them seriously. If history is at all knowable, with any degree of certainty, then the New Testament is one of THE most remarkable and reliable primary sources in the ancient world! I think it’s interesting - that radical critics & skeptics of the New Testament read quite a bit of material in order to “debunk” it as a hoax or as mythology, but they curiously don’t read about the history of critics and skeptics of the past, whose own theories been debunked and disproven. Through the years, The New Testament has stood strong like a stone-clad lighthouse anchored to bedrock, while the waves, foam and torrents of the critics have crashed against it to no affect (John 10:35b).

Humble waiting looks like this: “Be still before the Lord and wait patiently for him” (Psalm 37:7). And, yes, this can be difficult. God knows this. That’s why the Bible is chock-full of examples of what difficult waiting looks like. God wants us to know that he understands, and he wants us to believe that “all things are possible for one who believes” (Mark 9:23). It is possible to wait in the patient peace of faith.

ABDU MURRAY: Thanks for the opportunity to share about the book, Sean. The title is meant to be a double-entendre. In and of itself, truth doesn’t need saving but it does need to be saved in the sense that we’ve lost our emphasis on it as a culture. We’re in a “post-truth” society, which elevates personal preferences and feelings over facts and truth. We don’t deny that truth exists, we just subordinate it to our preferences. We think that this will lead to freedom and human dignity and flourishing. But it won’t. It will lead to chaos because truth no longer serves as the standard by which to judge human preferences and opinions. That’s why we’re seeing such vilification of “them.” Whoever disagrees with our preferences is automatically a villain, even if the truth is on their side. We need to recover our love of the truth and its primacy if we’re to escape the chaos that so laces our cultural climate. When we see that truth is the lens through which we should shape and express our preferences, we’ll see the truth that we are made in God’s image and that Jesus redeemed that image at the cross.

The students of the apostles played a pivotal role in preserving and promoting the eyewitness Gospel accounts. While many skeptics claim the New Testament Canon was formed during 4 th Century Church Councils (such as the Council of Nicea or Laodicea), the earliest believers had already preserved the canonical gospels and letters centuries prior . In fact, the early Church leaders prior to the first council at Nicea (known as the Ante-Nicene Church Fathers), began to collect and affirm the canon of Scripture in three separate geographical areas . The first surviving list of canonical texts dates to approximately 170AD in what is now known as the “Muratorian Fragment”, a partial copy of an ancient text discovered in the Ambrosian Library in Milan in the 18th century. This document affirmed and acknowledged Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Acts, Romans, 1 Corinthians, 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, 1 Thessalonians, 2 Thessalonians, 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, Titus, Philemon, Jude, 1 John, 2 John and Revelation as reliable, apostolic Scripture. The author of the Muratorian Fragment was also careful to warn his readers about Paul’s alleged letters to the Laodiceans and Alexandrians, and a document known as the “Apocalypse of Peter” (identifying these as forgeries).

To Eric, my brother in Christ, I have three things to say. (1) The two of us will never agree about Trump or a whole host of other issues, theological and political. But you already know that. (2) I pray that you will have a Flannery O’Connor-like revelation, the kind that slowly but effectively burns away our most grotesque qualities as the capaciousness of God’s grace settles upon us. I pray the same for myself. (3) Thank you for giving me a glimpse—even if transient—of the ways partisan divisions are transcended by the one whose life, death, and resurrection gives us our life.

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The field of archaeology demonstrates that the Bible is historically accurate. Now, this does not mean that it is inherently “true.” It does mean that it is reliable in its historical details—which gives some pretty good credibility to what else it has to say. If we can trust that the Bible accurately records for us geographical places (Israel, Egypt, Babylon, etc.) and historical people (Herod or Pontius Pilate, for example), it’s very likely it has many other true things to say. One reason I could never trust the Book of Mormon, in contrast, is that most of the places listed in its geography are make-believe. It’s very difficult for me to trust a book that is claiming to be nonfiction when its geography is clearly fiction.

It’s true that our leaders are doing much good in many ways. It’s also true that we have been compromised, fearful, spineless, and visionless when it comes to one of the greatest moral crises in history.

We have been laying out a “Case for the Bible” over the past few months and the evidence collection has been based on a question that many have posed: How do we know the Bible is the Word of God? You can be skeptical of the Bible, as I once was, but at some point, in light of the avalanche of evidence, you have to pause and ask yourself: Could it be true? If there is at least a 50/50 chance based on the evidence you’ve seen here that the Bible is the Word of God (and it’s so much more than that) don’t you owe it to yourself to consider it?

In the piece, Kissinger sounds an alarm over artificial intelligence, and raises questions about machine ethics and the possibility that humans may learn we’re not so special after all. Richards, author of the forthcoming book The Human Advantage: The Future of American Work In an Age of Smart Machines , pushes back, explaining how we can continue to use artificial intelligence to our advantage, prudently but without fear of the robot apocalypse or of computers becoming conscious and free.

Professionalism in the college classroom is on the decline. Since the 2016 election, professors all around my campus (UNC-Wilmington) have become much more inclined to use the classroom as a platform to spout political beliefs wholly unrelated to the course subject matter. In the case of one professor, the emotional trauma of Trump’s presidency eventually caused him to become so uncivil and unprofessional that he has now found himself without a job. The story of how that came about can be instructive for conservative and Christian students who find themselves subjected to pervasive abuse in the classroom.

I find Peterson to be quite an annoying blowhard. Has he read any contemporary atheist philosophers of religion? "Nietzsche this, Dostoevsky that." "Psychological significant of biblical stories" Yawn. He should at least read Hector Avalos, e.g., The End of Biblical Studies.

Since Roe v. Wade, especially in recent years, pro-lifers have made dramatic legislative gains in restricting abortion. Thank God for that. Yet we should never lose sight of the fact that the ultimate goal is to change hearts and minds, not just laws. bit.ly/2JE6FPq pic.twitter.com/kkXZhGXUTW